The Best of Gene Wolfe

“But if I’m dead . . .” Little Tib tried to get his thoughts in order. “You and Mama don’t have any other children.”

“You don’t understand, do you?”

Little Tib’s father had put his arm around Little Tib, and now he leaned down until their faces touched. But when they did, it seemed to Little Tib that his father’s face did not feel as it should. Little Tib reached up and felt it with both hands, and it came off in his hands, feeling like the plastic vegetables came in at the new place; perhaps this was Big Tib’s dream.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” he said.

Little Tib reached up to find out who had been pretending to be his father. The new face was metal, hard and cold.

“I am the president’s man now. I didn’t want you to know that, because I thought that it might upset you. The president is handling the situation personally.”

“Is Mama still at home?” Little Tib asked. He meant the new place.

“No. She’s in a different division—gee-seven. But I still see her sometimes. I think she’s in Atlanta now.”

“Looking for me?”

“She wouldn’t tell me.”

Something inside Little Tib, just under the hard place in the middle of his chest where all the ribs came together, began to get tighter and tighter, like a balloon being blown up too far. He felt that when it burst, he would burst too. It made it impossible to take more than tiny breaths, and it pressed against the voice thing in his neck so he could not speak. Inside himself he said forever that that was not his real mother and this was not his real father, that his real mother and father were the mother and father he had had at the old place; he would keep them inside for always, his real mother and father. The rain beat against his face; his nose was full of mucus; he had to breathe through his mouth, but his mouth was filling with saliva, which ran down his chin and made him ashamed.

Then the tears came in a hot flood on his cold cheeks, and the metal face fell off Indra like an old pie pan from a shelf, and went rattling and clanging across the blacktop under the stage.

He reached up to his father’s face again, and it was his face, but he said, “Little Tib, can’t you understand? It’s the Federal Reserve Card. It’s the goddamned card. It’s having no money, and nothing to do, and spending your whole life like a goddamn whipped dog. I only got in because of you—saying I’d hunt for you. We had training and all that, Skinnerian conditioning and deep hypnosis; they saw to that—but in the end it’s the damn card.” And while he said that, Little Tib could hear Indra’s sword, scraping and scraping, ever so slowly, across the boards of the stage. Little Tib jumped down and ran, not knowing or caring whether he was going to run into something.

In the end, he ran into Nitty. Nitty no longer had his sweat and wood-smoke smell, because of the rain, but he still had the same feel, and the same voice when he said, “There you are. I been lookin’ just everyplace for you. I thought somebody had run off with you to get you out of the wet. Where you been?” He raised Little Tib on his shoulders.

Little Tib plunged his hands into the thick, wet hair and hung on. “On the stage,” he said.

“On the stage still? Well, I swear.” Nitty was walking fast, taking big, long strides. Little Tib’s body rocked with the swing of them. “That was the one place I never thought to look for you. I thought you would have come off there fast, looking for me, or someplace dry. But I guess you were afraid of falling off.”

“Yes,” Little Tib said, “I was afraid of falling off.” Running in the rain had let all the air out of the balloon; he felt empty inside, and like he had no bones at all. Twice he nearly slid from Nitty’s shoulders, but each time Nitty’s big hands reached up and caught him.

The next morning a good-smelling woman came from the school for him. Little Tib was still in bed when she knocked on the door, but he heard Nitty open it, and her say, “I believe you have a blind child here.”

“Yes’m,” Nitty said.

“Mr. Parker—the new acting superintendent?—asked me to come over and escort him myself the first day. I’m Ms. Munson. I teach the blind class.”

“I’m not sure he’s got clothes fit for school,” Nitty told her.

“Oh, they come in just anything these days,” Ms. Munson said, and then she saw Little Tib, who had gotten out of bed when he heard the door open, and said, “I see what you mean. Is he dressed for a play?”

“Last night,” Nitty told her.

“Oh. I heard about it, but I wasn’t there.”

Then Little Tib knew he still had the skirt thing on that they had given him—but it was not; it was a dry, woolly towel. But he still had beads on, and metal bracelets on his arm.

“His others are real ragged.”

“I’m afraid he’ll have to wear them anyway,” Ms. Munson said. Nitty took him into the bathroom and took the beads and bracelets and towel off, and dressed him in his usual clothes. Then Ms. Munson led him out of the motel and opened the door of her little electric car for him.

“Did Mr. Parker get his job again?” Little Tib asked when the car bounced out of the motel lot and onto the street.

“I don’t know about again,” Ms. Munson said. “Did he have it before? But I understand he’s extremely well qualified in educational programming; and when they found out this morning that the computer was inoperative, he presented his credentials and offered to help. He called me about ten o’clock and asked me to go for you, but I couldn’t get away from the school until now.”

“It’s noon, isn’t it,” Little Tib said. “It’s too hot for morning.”

That afternoon he sat in Ms. Munson’s room with eight other blind children while a machine moved his hand over little dots on paper and told him what they were. When school was over and he could hear the seeing children milling in the hall outside, a woman older and thicker than Ms. Munson came for him and took him to a house where